Supporting Responsible Use of AI and Equitable Outcomes in Financial Services

At the AI Academic Symposium hosted by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C. (Virtual Event) Today's symposium on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in financial services is part of the Federal Reserve's broader effort to understand AI's application to financial services, assess methods for managing risks arising from this technology, and determine where banking regulators can support responsible use of AI and equitable outcomes by improving supervisory clarity.1 The potential scope of AI applications is wide ranging. For instance, researchers are turning to AI to help analyze climate change, one of the central challenges of our time. With nonlinearities and tipping points, climate change is highly complex, and quantification for risk assessments requires the analysis of vast amounts of data, a task for which the AI field of machine learning is particularly well-suited.2 The journal Nature recently reported the development of an AI network which could "vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery" by accurately predicting a protein's 3-D shape from its amino acid sequence.3 In November 2018, I shared some early observations on the use of AI in financial services.4